Saturday, September 21, 2013

Friday Nasihah

Living The QuranFutureAl-Araf (The Heights) - Chapter 7: Verse 188

"Say,
'I hold not for myself [the power of] benefit or harm,
except what Allah has willed. And if I knew the unseen, I
could have acquired much wealth, and no harm would have
touched me. I am but a warner and a bringer of good tidings
to a people who believe.'"

The Prophet, peace be upon
him, is the leader of all the Prophets. Many miracles are ascribed to
him and people learned the religion from him. People acquired piety and
righteousness by following his prescribed path. In this verse, Allah
instructed him to give people an account of his helplessness making it
clearly known to the people that he is neither capable of exercising any
authority nor possess any knowledge of the unseen. One can easily
derive from the fact that as long as he does not even possess an
authority to gain a certain advantage for himself or to ward off an evil
from inflicting him, how could he benefit or harm someone else.

The knowledge of the unseen is one of the Attributes of Allah and the Prophet is His Messenger.
The mission of a Messenger is to warn people about the dire
consequences of bad actions and to give people glad tidings about
virtuous deeds.

The Prophets do not enjoy the
distinction of having been awarded the keys to the unseen to the effect
that they may have knowledge of someone's innermost feelings or could
make predictions about whether or not someone is going to be blessed
with a child, whether one's business is going to yield profit or incur a
loss, or whether someone is going to emerge victorious in a battlefield
or face a defeat. As far as the above things are concerned, everybody
is equally unaware about them regardless of his status. However, certain
remarks which are made in reference to a certain context out of one's
wisdom do sometimes come true and sometimes they don't.

Compiled From:
"Taqwiyat-ul-Iman" - Shah Ismail Shaheed, pp. 74-76

Understanding the Prophet's LifeAustere Living
One day Umar ibn al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him,
came into the house of the Prophet, peace be upon him, to find him lying
on a simple mattress which left its marks on his body. Umar started to
sob.

'Why are you crying, O Umar', said the Prophet.
'I thought of Caesar and Chosroes sitting on thrones
of gold, wearing silk. And you are the Messenger of God, yet here you
are sitting on this simple mattress.'
'O Umar', said the Prophet, 'are you not satisfied that they have this world and we have the next?'

So simple and austere were his living habits that he went
half-hungry most of the time. Aishah, may Allah be pleased with her,
reported that for three consecutive nights, a fire was not kindled in
the homes of the Prophet because there was nothing to be cooked. When
asked how they managed, she said they depended on water and dates (the
two blacks).
Where is the basis for the image of a self-indulgent,
luxury-loving ruler with his 'harem' which some critics of the Prophet
have contrived to draw for him?Despite the austere simplicity of his life, the Prophet's homes were by no means unhappy or devoid of pleasure and delight.
It is a great tribute to the personality of the Prophet that those
homes, lacking any comfort or even abundance of food, were yet full of
love and happiness. Compiled From:"Sunshine At Madinah" - Zakaria Bashier, pp. 154, 155

Blindspot! Emotion

Educating the heart, the mind
and the imagination in order to train ourselves to see better, hear
better, smell better, taste better and touch better is one of the
requirements of the autonomy and freedom that lie at the heart of
modernity, of advanced technologies and of the globalization of the
means of communication. In
an age of global communications, anyone who has not been trained to be
critical of information is a vulnerable, fragile mind who is open to all
kinds of potential manipulations. We also need the time to
distance ourselves, to analyse situations and to evaluate critically
what we perceive. Nothing is easy. This spiritual exercise is crucially
important because it gives meaning to the most elementary actions in
life: seeing, hearing, touching ... and thinking, praying and creating. Spirituality consists in the added meaning that is inherent in even the simplest human actions. It
may take the form of faith, thought, art or love, but it always
involves a choice, an act of the free will, as opposed to emotion which
is a passive reaction, imposed and sometimes uncontrolled: an ocean of
difference between the two. Emotion is to spirituality what physical attraction is to love.